Doubly Immortal: The Song of Songs (1933)

A direct product of male desire and fetishistic transferral, art in this film simultaneously intensifies and displaces life; it causes both ecstasy and trauma. Though Mamoulian's camera frequently lingers on Dietrich's face itself in order to open intimate windows on her ever shifting appearances, it spends almost equal time to offer us images of her statue in scenarios of what Gaylyn Studlar would call 'iconic textuality that is, highly choreographed scenarios emphasizing the sign as a creation independent of its referent.

(Koepnick 2007: 47–48)

In 2011, the Deutsche Kinemathek received a gift for its Marlene Dietrich Collection: a sculpture – a life-sized bronze nude – The Song of Songs, a replica of the figure by Salvatore Scarpitta that had played a starring role, as Lutz Koepnick notes, in the 1933 Paramount film of the same title. Announcing the gift in its newsletter, the Kinemathek explained the origins of this bronze cast, made, 'as a replica of the original' in the 1990s (2011). But the term 'original' is something of a misnomer, or mystery here. As the short article about Stella Cartaino's (the artist's granddaughter) gift also notes, at least three identical sculptures were made for the film. The sculptures were all cast in plaster from the same mold, so there really was no original. But certainly the two surviving plasters (one was destroyed on film) are more original than the more durable bronze that was donated to the museum.

That object – the bronze figure of Marlene Dietrich, which came into being around the time of her death, more than 40 years after Scarpitta's, and some 60 years after he had modeled the sculpture; and which went on exhibit in the Kinemathek's ground floor showroom in 2011 – is a paradoxical artifact. Scarpitta generally destroyed his molds, so his son, Salvatore Jr. (also an artist), would have made the mold for the bronze cast from the plaster that his father had retained, which itself would have been cast in a mold, made from the impermanent clay original Scarpitta created 'of' Dietrich. The bronze is thus four processes removed from the hand of the artist and, you might say, five generations removed from the movie goddess whom it portrays. It is a reproduction of a sculpture made for the movies – one conceived as a movie star. The statue, director Rouben Mamoulian wrote when trying to cast the role, 'should be a masterpiece because it is not merely a prop in the picture but a central point around which the whole story revolves [...] it will have as many closeups as any star.' Note here the double meaning of the word 'cast.' The Kinemathek's bronze is not exactly a work of art and not quite a prop. If it has an aura at all, it is a reconditioned aura; it is, in a sense, a reification of ephemera: the residue of the very particular type of aura that attaches to legendary stars such as Marlene Dietrich.

The Song of Songs was Paramount Pictures' 1933 adaptation of Prussian writer Hermann Sudermann's 1908 novel Das hohe Lied, a story that had seen two previous Hollywood adaptations: The Song of Songs, 1918, directed by Joseph Kaufman and starring Elsie Ferguson; and Lily of the Dust, 1924, directed by Dimitri Buchowetzki and starring Pola Negri, both for Famous Players-Lasky. The 1933 Paramount version was produced and directed by Rouben Mamoulian, who was a co-author with Leo Birinsky (as Leo Birinski) and Samuel Hoffenstein of the screen adaptation of Sudermann's novel and the American playwright Edward Sheldon's play based upon it. The film, then, not unlike the bronze sculpture that descended from it – and like all film adaptations, really – is generations removed from an original source (the Sudermann novel): a remake of a film adaptation of a play based on the novel. The question of authenticity or originality is moot; the aura is already withered.

In The Song of Songs, which is set early in the last century, Marlene Dietrich plays Lily Czepanek, an innocent but sensual, orphaned country girl who moves to Berlin. Working in the bookstore owned by her Aunt Rasmussen (Alison Skipworth), she meets Richard Waldow (Brian Aherne), a handsome young sculptor who lives and works across the street. She succumbs to his entreaties to pose for him and becomes the inspiration and model for his life-size nude, 'The Song of Songs,' and then his lover, marking the beginning of a precipitous fall from innocence. Taken with her, Richard's wealthy, decadent client, a retired Colonel, the Baron von Merzbach (Lionel Atwill), persuades the ambivalent and weak -willed artist to abandon Lily to him and purchases the cooperation of her aunt. Bereft, she is compelled into a loveless marriage to the Baron and turned into a beautiful but unhappy sophisticate (taken home to a neo-medieval, almost expressionist castle and instructed in piano, song, dance, French, and – it is implied – depraved sexual acts). A recriminatory act of infidelity (or the appearance of one, meant to hurt a visiting Waldow more than her husband) leads to her banishment and downfall, a (rather glamorous) downfall from which her reunion with Waldow at the end of the film redeems her. The loss of innocence theme was preserved from Sudermann's novel in Sheldon's play and both previous adaptations. The correspondence between art and sensual passion that comes to exemplify Lily's spirit and self-image also derives from Sudermann. Much of the narrative, however, was changed substantially in the Paramount adaptation and the sculptor character and modeling theme were wholly an invention of Mamoulian's film. Sculpture, it can be inferred, was imported into the story to play a particular role (or roles).

Hermann Sudermann (1857–1928), the 'Balzac of the East,' although little remembered now, was a towering figure in drama and literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. An editor of the radical newspaper Deutsches Reichsblatt from 1881 to 1889, and already the author of collected stories and a novel, Frau Sorge (1887), Sudermann gained enormous acclaim with his first play, Die Ehre (1889), which purportedly stirred Berlin youth to riot or protest over three days. Eleanora Duse, Sarah Bernhardt, and Helena Modjeska starred in famed productions of Sudermann's Heimat (Magda in English). Sudermann's plays were performed in the premier theaters of Berlin, Vienna, Paris, Rome, New York, and as far as Japan.

Sudermann reached such heights of theatrical recognition that [...] men all across Europe wanted their barbers to give them a 'Sudermann trim.' His visage was on postage stamps, tram tickets, ration cards, railway postcards and souvenir medals, and his whereabouts were a weekly feature in many Berlin newspapers. His literary reputation was such that major writers of that time, such as Bernard Shaw, Emile Zola and Henrick Ibsen, all attended productions of Sudermann's plays.

(Friesen 2011)

Among the forty-plus other filmed adaptations of Sudermann's works are F.W. Murnau's Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), based on Sudermann's short story 'Die Reise nach Tilsit'/'Trip to Tilset,' and Flesh and the Devil (Brown, 1927), with Greta Garbo, based on his play The Undying Past.

Marlene Dietrich starred in The Song of Songs, her first Hollywood film not – for personal and contractual reasons – directed by Josef von Sternberg. She was not pleased about this; it evidently took a suit to bring her to work but, according to several sources, finally the production offered her a critical opportunity to wrest some control over her own image and craft (Anon 1933: 18). There is a fascinating metacinematic paradox here, then. Dietrich – famously a creation of von Sternberg's ('Like an artist working in clay, von Sternberg has molded and modeled her to his own design, and Marlene, plastic and willing to be material in the director's hands, has responded to his creative moods' [Tolischus 1931: 28-29; 129]) – took on a role in the film in which she was literally modeled in clay by a sculptor, and in which the Pygmalion theme was telescoped ('you modeled her in marble but I modeled her in the flesh, so to speak; I'm a bit of an artist myself ...,' says Merzbach, Song's ersatz Svengali), yet in undertaking the part without her Pygmalion (Svengali?), learned to master modeling herself in light. Given that the sculpture theme had entered the Song of Songs script –after several revisions – sometime after Dietrich's services were secured, it is entirely possible that she inspired it. Although her prior film, von Sternberg's Blonde Venus (1932), had little to do with high art, posters and other elements of the advertising campaign featured variations on a sketch of Dietrich as the Venus de Milo, with the sculpted goddess's naked torso approximated by a skimpy, transparent, close-fitting bodice and her broken arms suggested by long black gloves [Fig. 5].

The motif effectively invokes art, beauty, eroticism, and Dietrich's status as a movie goddess, in one figure: one – as Mary Beth Haralovich points out – that is iconographically unrelated to the character, Helen Faraday, that Dietrich played in Blonde Venus. Perhaps this overdetermined image showed Mamoulian how he might give visual form to some of Sudermann's more problematic themes. It is perhaps no coincidence that in an epistle prepared in defense of the nudity of the statuary in The Song of Songs, Mamoulian asserted that the 'first synonym for beauty that comes to anybody's mind is always Venus de Milo' (Mamoulian 1933). But contradictions around the significance and signification of nudity resound in The Song of Songs, as is vividly captured by discrepancies between the language of the letter contracting the titular sculpture and subsequent accounts.

Dear Mr. Scarpitta:

You are hereby engaged to prepare and sculpture a life-size statue for use in our production entitled THE SONG OF SONGS. The head of such statue shall be a reproduction of Miss Marlene Dietrich who is the star in the said production, and the figure thereon shall be an ideal figure of your own composition. It is agreed that Miss Dietrich shall not be required to pose for you in any manner other than for the purpose of enabling you to reproduce her head.

Marlene Dietrich, who wears trousers, and Sally Rand, who wears nothing, continue to oppose each other in loop theaters this week. However, it must be said of Marlene that in her picture, 'Song of Songs,' at the Oriental, she has several scenes wherein her statue is costumed as scantily as Sally herself at the Chicago.

In fact, it is Marlene's undraped counterpart sculped in marble by the inspired hands of Brian Aherne that causes as many gasps of amazement and approval from Oriental audiences as does Sally's fan-tasy at the stage showhouse [...]. That Miss Dietrich had no compunction about posing in the nude is ample tribute to the loveliness of the finished masterpiece. S. Cartaino Scarpitta [...] is the genius who molded Marlene's charms. Never before has a studio engaged an artist or sculptor of international repute for picture purposes.

The contradictions revealed in two documents – a letter contracting sculptor Salvatore Cartaino Scarpitta (1887–1948) to create the titular sculpture for Paramount's film and a notice in a Chicago paper noting the proximate and competing attractions of Dietrich and Sally Rand in local theaters – are only some of those which attend the complex roles that real works of art play in this fiction film and others. The 'masterpiece in marble' that the newspaper item in nearly the same breath reveals to be an end run around the censors was indeed the work of an accomplished artist of some repute, but it is not made of marble. Indeed, The Song of Songs illustrates the process and the progress of the sculpture from its inception in a sketch, then a small maquette, to a full-scale armature upon which plaster is built up and then clay modeled. Numerous scenes show the sculptor working the pliable clay – in fact, much of the subtext depends upon such images. Generally, such an additive sculptural process results in a form from which a mold is made, in turn from which a sculpture is cast, typically either in bronze or plaster. Marble, on the other hand, must be carved; it is worked subtractively.

The anonymous Chicago reviewer was understandably confused about the medium, however. The movie itself wants to have its marble and mold it, too; it bares some of the devices of sculpture but not those of the movies: featuring a veritably documentary scene about process yet seeming to count on its audience's ignorance of or indifference to sculptural materials and techniques. Not only does publicity for the film tout the 'poem in marble conceived by the noted Italian sculptor S.C. Scarpitta,' but the very script insists, too, upon the statue's marmoreal standing. 'Next the clay,' says Waldow, the fictional sculptor, as he completes his sketch, continuing – as if one could cast in stone – 'then the marble: The Song of Songs in marble!' Later, the libertine Baron von Merzbach echoes this material claim, saying to Richard of Lily, the model and inspiration for the figure, 'you modeled her in marble; I modeled her in the flesh.' Marble takes on metaphoric meaning again and again. Of course, a sculptor might make a clay study for a marble work, or two versions of one theme – one in each medium – but in this case, Scarpitta did not, Richard is not shown doing so, and when Lily, at the film's climax, attacks the work with a handy sledgehammer, it breaks apart readily, as plaster – revealing itself to be hollow and rather brittle, not solid and hard as marble – a material prized for, among other traits, its resistance to shattering. But what is in fact a significant semantic and artistic difference means little in the unfolding of the motion picture, becoming a minor detail, the kind of quibble destined for, at best, an IMDb entry under 'goofs.' For, along with the aura of the work of art, what decays in the process of mechanical reproduction is its material facticity. In a museum the medium matters; in a film, the medium is film; the sculptural material is, ultimately, immaterial.

The incompatibility of what is shown and what is said about sculptural medium in The Song of Songs parallels the comparably equivocal treatment of sculptural signification, as suggested by the short Chicago item: the way that the prestige of fine art is used to throw an albeit thin veil over the more prurient purposes of the female nude sculpture. As Thomas Doherty notes, 'finding innovative ways to reveal women in states of undress and dishevelment was a creative challenge pre-Code Hollywood met unblushingly,' and this is without doubt one function of sculpture generally and the title work particularly in Mamoulian's film (1999: 118–119). Not only does the nude statue readily suggest and stand in for the star who could not be shown undressed, but it is often handled and beheld with open sensuality, as well as motivating suggestive scenes of undressing. This equivocation between art and exploitation is certainly not new with the movies but takes on added urgency in a commercial medium in which profits are perceived to obtain more from the latter, while particular artists (writers, directors, production artists, actors) and critics value the former, and censorship bears down on all. These internal tensions are captured well by Dave Kehr's characterization of The Song of Songs upon its DVD release in 2011:

'The Song of Songs' proudly shows off its cultural credentials: a prestigious source novel (by Hermann Sudermann, whose short story 'The Trip to Tilsit' was the basis for Murnau's 'Sunrise'); a British supporting cast (Brian Aherne as the Berlin sculptor inspired by Dietrich's naive peasant girl; Lionel Atwill as the decadent aristocrat who steals her away); a nonstop score composed of snippets from Chopin, Schubert and Strauss; and at its center a monumental nude sculpture of Dietrich, executed by Salvatore Cartaino Scarpitta (whose allegorical bas reliefs for the newly opened Los Angeles Stock Exchange were the sensation of the hour).

The sculpture, which might have been designed for the prow of an Art Deco ocean liner, depicts Dietrich as the embodiment of the eternal feminine, rising up on point with her arms open at her side – a pose that suggests great spiritual yearning but also exaggerates the lift of a pair of perky breasts.

Essentially the film is little more than an elaborate ruse to film Dietrich undressing (as the peasant girl – shyly at first, then with defiant pride – disrobes for the sculptor) and display the results in an aestheticized form that would not disturb the local censor boards.

(Kehr 2011)